1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a print system, a printing method, and a computer-readable recording medium storing a print program capable of reducing a total process time of printing.
2. Description of Related Art
In a print device such as an electro-photographic printer, print data described using a Page Description Language (PDL) is converted into a bitmap image (raster image) by a Raster Image Processing (RIP) process or the like. The RIP process is executed by a printer controller incorporated in the print device. The print device forms a bitmap image as a real image on a paper medium. The image formation is executed by a printer engine incorporated in the print device.
In general, the printer controller is connected to the printer engine in a Point To Point (P2P) manner to perform the RIP process dedicated to the connected printer engine. Therefore, the function of the RIP process by the printer controller is also set in a fixed manner in accordance with a function of the printer engine. For example, the printer controller connected to the printer engine supporting color printing performs the RIP process (hereinafter, referred to as color RIP) corresponding to the color printing in a fixed manner. The printer controller connected to the print engine supporting monochrome printing performs the RIP process (hereinafter, referred to as monochrome RIP) corresponding to the monochrome printing in a fixed manner.
However, if the RIP process is in a fixed manner, in some cases, the RIP process may be excessive or function-mismatched depending on print data.
For example, in the case where the printer controller has a function of the color RIP, even when the print data includes object data which can be processed by the monochrome RIP, the entire print data are processed by the color RIP in a fixed manner. In this case, the function is excessive. On the contrary, in the case where the printer controller has a function of the monochrome RIP, even when the print data includes object data which are to be processed by the color RIP, the entire print data are processed by the monochrome RIP in a fixed manner. In this case, the function is mismatched.
Therefore, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 10-289079 proposes a technique where, in the case where different types of object data are mixed in the print data, the object data are assigned to a plurality of print devices having different RIP functions, and RIP processes corresponding to the types of the object data are performed.
However, in the invention disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 10-289079, the plurality of the print devices separately performs the RIP processes on the object data and separately retains RIP-performed raster data. For this reason, during printing, by passing one paper sheet through all the print devices which perform the RIP processes, printing of the object needs to be repeated one by one. In other words, printing needs to be performed on the same paper sheet several times. Therefore, if there are many types of the object data included in the print data, the printing times are increased. As a result, the total process time of printing becomes long.